why should we keep the electoral college essay

Reasons to Keep the Electoral College

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Under the Electoral College system , it is possible for a presidential candidate to lose the nationwide popular vote, yet be elected president of the United States by winning in only a handful of key states.

Did the Founding Fathers—the framers of the Constitution—not realize that the Electoral College system effectively took the power to select the American president out of the hands of the American people?

In fact, the Founders always intended that the states—not the people—select the president.

Article II of the U.S. Constitution grants the power to elect the president and vice president to the states through the Electoral College system. Under the Constitution, the highest-ranking U.S. officials elected by the direct popular vote of the people are the governors of the states.

Beware the Tyranny of the Majority

To be brutally honest, the Founding Fathers gave the American public of their day little credit for political awareness when it came to selecting the president.

Here are some of their telling statements from the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

"A popular election in this case is radically vicious. The ignorance of the people would put it in the power of some one set of men dispersed through the Union, and acting in concert, to delude them into any appointment." — Delegate Elbridge Gerry, July 25, 1787

"The extent of the country renders it impossible, that the people can have the requisite capacity to judge of the respective pretensions of the candidates." — Delegate George Mason, July 17, 1787

"The people are uninformed, and would be misled by a few designing men." — Delegate Elbridge Gerry, July 19, 1787

The Founding Fathers had seen the dangers of placing ultimate power into a single set of human hands. Accordingly, they feared that placing the unlimited power to elect the president into the politically naive hands of the people could lead to a "tyranny of the majority."

In response, they created the Electoral College system as a process to insulate the selection of the president from the whims of the public.

Small States Get Equal Voice

The Electoral College helps give rural states with lower populations an equal voice.

If the popular vote alone decided elections, the presidential candidates would rarely visit those states or consider the needs of rural residents in their policy platforms.

Due to the Electoral College process, candidates must get votes from multiple states—large and small—thus helping to ensure that the president will address the needs of the entire country.

Preserving Federalism

The Founding Fathers also felt the Electoral College system would enforce the concept of federalism —the division and sharing of powers between the state and national governments .

Under the Constitution, the people are empowered to choose, through a direct popular election, the men and women who represent them in their state legislatures and in the United States Congress . The states, through the Electoral College, are empowered to choose the president and vice president.

A Democracy or Not?

Critics of the Electoral College system argue that by taking the selection of the president out of the hands of the public at large, the Electoral College system flies in the face of democracy. America is, after all, a democracy, is it not?

Two of the most widely recognized forms of democracy are:

• Pure or Direct Democracy — All decisions are made directly by a majority vote of all eligible citizens. By their vote alone, citizens can enact laws and select or remove their leaders. The power of the people to control their government is unlimited.
• Representative Democracy — The citizens rule through representatives whom they elect periodically to keep them accountable. The power of the people to control their government is thus limited by the actions of their elected representatives.

The United States is a representative democracy operated under a "republican" form of government, as provided for in Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, which states, "The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a Republican form of Government..." (This should not be confused with the Republican political party which is merely named after the form of government.)

In 1787, the Founding Fathers, based on their direct knowledge of history showing that unlimited power tends to become a tyrannical power, created the United States as a republic—not a pure democracy.

Direct democracy works only when all or at least most of the people participate in the process.

The Founding Fathers knew that as the nation grew and the time required for debating and voting on every issue increased, the public’s desire to take part in the process would quickly decrease.

As a result, the decisions and actions taken would not truly reflect the will of the majority, but small groups of people representing their own interests.

The Founders were unanimous in their desire that no single entity, be it the people or an agent of the government, be given unlimited power. Achieving a " separation of powers " ultimately became their highest priority.

As a part of their plan to separate powers and authority, the Founders created the Electoral College as the method by which the people could choose their highest government leader—the president—while avoiding at least some of the dangers of a direct election.

But because the Electoral College has worked just as the Founding Fathers intended for over 200 years does not mean that it should never be modified or even abandoned completely.

Electoral Count Act of 2022

After the Chaos at the Capitol of January 6, 2021, polls showed that the American people have never been more skeptical of their electoral processes. In a rare bipartisan move, Congress is hoping to reverse that trend. 

On September 30, 2022, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, joined Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, in voting to advance the Electoral Count Reform Act , a bill that would reform an antiquated law that was used as grounds in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. 

The Electoral Count Reform Act is meant to address ambiguities found in the Electoral Count Act of 1887. The centuries-old measure governs the process of sending, counting, and certifying the state's electoral votes for presidential elections. However, its shortcomings have complicated presidential elections. Most recently, the 1887 law was invoked to organize alternative slates of electors and pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to obstruct the certification of the 2020 presidential election results.

The Electoral Count Reform Act would amend the Electoral Count Act of  1887 by clarifying the purely ceremonial role of the vice president in certifying elections, reaffirming that a state’s electors must be selected according to already existing state law, and raising the threshold needed for members of Congress to lodge objections to electoral votes. Currently, the certification of a presidential election can be halted if just one member of each chamber objects.

The bill enjoys strong bipartisan support in Congress. “I strongly support the modest changes that our colleagues in the working group have fleshed out after months of detailed discussions. I will proudly support the legislation, provided that nothing more than technical changes are made to its current form,” McConnell said in a press statement.

The Senate is likely to wait to vote on the Electoral Count Reform Act until Congress reconvenes after the November 2022 midterm elections . “The substance of this bill is common sense,” McConnell said. “This is not an opportunity we should pass up.”

Changing the System

Any change to the way America chooses its president will require a constitutional amendment . For this to come about:

First , a presidential candidate must lose the nationwide popular vote , but be elected through the Electoral College vote. This has already happened exactly four times in the nation's history:

• In 1876 , Republican Rutherford B. Hayes , with 4,036,298 popular votes won 185 electoral votes. His main opponent, Democrat Samuel J. Tilden , won the popular vote with 4,300,590 votes but won only 184 electoral votes. Hayes was elected president.  
• In 1888 , Republican Benjamin Harrison , with 5,439,853 popular votes won 233 electoral votes. His main opponent, Democrat Grover Cleveland , won the popular vote with 5,540,309 votes but won only 168 electoral votes. Harrison was elected president.  
• In 2000 , Republican George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore by a margin of 50,996,582 to 50,456,062. But after the U.S. Supreme Court halted vote recounts in Florida, George W. Bush was awarded the state's 25 electoral votes and won the presidency through a 271 to 266 vote margin in the Electoral College.  
• In 2016 , Republican Donald Trump lost the popular vote with 62,984,825. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton received a total of 65,853,516 popular votes. In the Electoral College, Trump was granted 306 votes to Clinton's 232.  

It is sometimes reported that Richard M. Nixon received more popular votes in the 1960 election than winner John F. Kennedy , but official results showed Kennedy with 34,227,096 popular votes to Nixon's 34,107,646. Kennedy won 303 Electoral College votes to Nixon's 219 votes.  

Next , a candidate that loses the popular vote but wins the electoral vote must turn out to be a particularly unsuccessful and unpopular president. Otherwise, the impetus to blame the nation's woes on the Electoral College system will never materialize.

Finally , the constitutional amendment must get a two-thirds vote from both houses of Congress and be ratified by three-fourths of the states.

Even if the first two criteria were met, it remains highly unlikely that the Electoral College system would be changed or repealed.

Under the above circumstances, it is probable that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats would hold a strong majority of seats in Congress. Requiring a two-thirds vote from both houses, a constitutional amendment must have strong bi-partisan support—support it will not get from a split Congress. (The president cannot veto a constitutional amendment.)

To be ratified and become effective, a constitutional amendment must also be approved by the legislatures of 39 out of the 50 states. By design, the Electoral College system grants the states the power to elect the president of the United States .

How likely is it that 39 states are going to vote to give up that power? Moreover, 12 states control 53 percent of the votes in the Electoral College, leaving only 38 states that might even consider ratification.

No Bad Results

Even the harshest critics would have trouble proving that in more than 200 years of operation, the Electoral College system has produced bad results. Only twice have the electors stumbled and been unable to choose a president, thus throwing the decision to the House of Representatives .

And who did the House decide on in those two cases? Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams .

" Electoral College Results ." National Archives. Washington DC: Office of the Federal Register, 2020. 

• Republic vs. Democracy: What Is the Difference?
• Has an Independent Ever Won the Presidency?
• How the US Electoral College System Works
• 12th Amendment: Fixing the Electoral College
• Electoral College Pros and Cons
• Purposes and Effects of the Electoral College
• Presidents Elected Without Winning the Popular Vote
• How Electoral Votes Are Awarded
• The National Popular Vote Plan
• How Many Electoral Votes Does a Candidate Need to Win?
• Learn How Many Total Electoral Votes There Are
• Who Invented the Electoral College?
• What Happens If the Presidential Election Is a Tie
• What Happens if There Is a Tie in the Electoral College?
• How many Electors does each State have?
• How the President Is Elected

5 Reasons to Keep the Electoral College

The future of the Electoral College is being debated following the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections when the winner of the popular vote lost the electoral college vote and thus the election.

Advocates of the institution point to its functionality, endurance, and tradition as valuable features. The Electoral College is also viewed as a critical part of the checks and balances fundamental to the American political system.

The following five reasons to keep the Electoral College are used by its defenders.

1. Maintain American Federalism

A key argument to keep the Electoral College is that the process is integral to America’s federalist philosophy.

Federalism involves diffusion of powers among federal, state, and local governments rather than a strong central government. The Electoral College is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution but states are allowed to determine how electors are selected. Small states and large states have their say in each presidential election based on each state’s popular vote.

Allen Guelzo argued in National Affairs that eliminating the Electoral College would open other institutions to reform. He suggested opening federalism to review would eliminate the need for the U.S. Senate because senators represent entire states rather than single voters. Guelzo also noted that state governments would lose their say in national affairs because electoral votes offer units of influence in elections.

Guelzo said that getting rid of the Electoral College would leave the United States open to messy parliamentary-style elections.

2. Tradition of Slow but Steady Institutions

Advocates for the Electoral College harken back to the deliberations of the Constitutional Conventions over the new nation’s political processes.

Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried argues that states act as diffusers and filters in national politics. Electoral voting blocs by region go back and forth depending on regional changes as well as party stances. These changes take hold over decades of elections rather than oscillating from election to election. Fried suggests that the Electoral College has survived political strife, civil war, and other changes because represents state interests and protects against outlier movements.

Guelzo adds that the U.S. Constitution’s checks and balances mean that the American government isn’t supposed to move quickly. The executive, legislative, and judicial branches take great pains to limit excessive power by their respective branches. Each U.S. senator holds office for six years, providing enough time to implement policies without having to frequently seek a mandate.

Guelzo says that the nation’s founders included deliberate institutions to check the early impulse toward a messy and inefficient direct democracy.

3. Encourage National Campaigns

Supporters of the current electoral process say it forces candidates into truly national campaigns.

Jurist Richard Posner spoke about the Electoral College’s role in electing “everyone’s president” in a 2012 Slate article . He said that it is impossible for the leader in electoral votes to win enough states in one region to capture the presidency. Voters in different regions don’t need to worry that a candidate who only speaks to a small group of states will be their nation’s head of state. Posner also believed that the Electoral College forces presidential candidates and parties to develop national appeal by campaigning in closely contested states across the country.

Senior Fellow Ronald Rotunda with the Cato Institute wrote an essay noting the leverage provided to small states and racial minorities by the Electoral College. The District of Columbia and seven states have three electoral votes each, meaning that they can act as decisive voices in close presidential elections. Rotunda argued that voters in these states would be completely ignored without the Electoral College.

He also stated that black and Latino voters attract attention from national candidates because they tend to live in large states with significant electoral vote counts.

4. Clear and Decisive Outcomes

In a 2008 MIT conference on the Electoral College, SUNY Cortland Professor Judith Best said that a popular vote presidential election would create chaos due to a “50 Floridas” situation. Best referred to the contentious election deadlock that took place in Florida following the 2000 presidential election . Proponents of maintaining the Electoral College often point to uncertainty surrounding lawsuits and recounts related to a popular vote model.

Posner concluded that electoral vote margins tend to exceed popular vote margins for winning presidential candidates. He said state voting blocs make ties rare and the popular vote remains an informal check on unpopular presidents. Posner also stated that a popular vote election would likely require a runoff mechanism in cases where no candidate receives a majority of votes. He cited the 1968 and 1992 elections as examples where the absence of a popular vote majority would lead to serious questions about the president’s mandate without the Electoral College.

Peter Wallison with the American Enterprise Institute followed Posner’s thread by arguing for the Electoral College as a means for presidential legitimacy. Wallison wrote that electoral votes create a majority winner in each election, sparing the nation any periods of constitutional crisis. He imagined a scenario under a popular vote system where individual issue parties fill the ballot and divide the presidential vote.

Wallison concluded that the Electoral College is an elegant solution to the legitimacy issue that doesn’t require constitutional amendments and partisan sparring.

5. Pitfalls of Popular Vote

Many arguments for keeping the Electoral College in place poke holes in arguments made for popular vote elections.

Guelzo is among many advocates who note that the United States is a constitutional republic rather than a democracy. He also counters arguments for the concept of one person, one vote by noting that the concept comes from a U.S. Supreme Court decision rather than a constitutional provision.

In short, advocates see the Electoral College as the legitimate approach to presidential elections based on the country’s origins.

The Heritage Foundation published an essay in 2004 that, among other arguments, presented the Electoral College as a firewall against fraud. In the current system, a small number of fraudulent votes have no impact on the outcome of a presidential election. The Electoral College prevents systematic fraud by diffusing fraudulent voting across multiple states. This essay also argued that the margin for recounts, lawsuits, and questions about legitimacy would expand without the filter of electoral votes.

Fried also offered a response to critics of the Electoral College who want direct democratic elections for president. He noted in the New York Times that America’s democratic impulses are matched by democratic processes at the local and state level. Voters in each state choose their school board members, city councilors, and state legislators. The balance of direct democracy at the local level with a voting bloc system at the national level is the essence of federalism, according to Electoral College supporters.

5 Reasons to Abolish the Electoral College

The Electoral College – Top 3 Pros and Cons

Pro/Con Arguments | Discussion Questions | Take Action | Sources | More Debates

The debate over the continued use of the Electoral College resurfaced during the 2016 presidential election , when Donald Trump lost the general election to Hillary Clinton by over 2.8 million votes and won the Electoral College by 74 votes. The official general election results indicate that Trump received 304 Electoral College votes and 46.09% of the popular vote (62,984,825 votes), and Hillary Clinton received 227 Electoral College votes and 48.18% of the popular vote (65,853,516 votes). [ 1 ]

Prior to the 2016 election, there were four times in US history when a candidate won the presidency despite losing the popular vote: 1824 ( John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson ), 1876 ( Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden ), 1888 ( Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland ), and 2000 ( George W. Bush over Al Gore ). [ 2 ]

The Electoral College was established in 1788 by Article II of the US Constitution , which also established the executive branch of the US government, and was revised by the Twelfth Amendment (ratified June 15, 1804), the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified July 1868), and the Twenty-Third Amendment (ratified Mar. 29, 1961). Because the procedure for electing the president is part of the Constitution, a Constitutional Amendment (which requires two-thirds approval in both houses of Congress plus approval by 38 states) would be required to abolish the Electoral College. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ]

The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College as a compromise between electing the president via a vote in Congress only or via a popular vote only. The Electoral College comprises 538 electors; each state is allowed one elector for each Representative and Senator (DC is allowed 3 electors as established by the Twenty-Third Amendment). [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ]

In each state, a group of electors is chosen by each political party. On election day, voters choosing a presidential candidate are actually casting a vote for an elector. Most states use the “winner-take-all” method, in which all electoral votes are awarded to the winner of the popular vote in that state. In Nebraska and Maine, the candidate that wins the state’s overall popular vote receives two electors, and one elector from each congressional district is apportioned to the popular vote winner in that district. For a candidate to win the presidency, he or she must win at least 270 Electoral College votes. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ]

At least 700 amendments have been proposed to modify or abolish the Electoral College. [ 25 ]

On Monday Dec. 19, 2016, the electors in each state met to vote for President and Vice President of the United States. Of the 538 Electoral College votes available, Donald J. Trump received 304 votes, Hillary Clinton received 227 votes, and seven votes went to others: three for Colin Powell, one for Faith Spotted Eagle, one for John Kasich, one for Ron Paul, and one for Bernie Sanders). On Dec. 22, 2016, the results were certified in all 50 states. On Jan. 6, 2017, a joint session of the US Congress met to certify the election results and Vice President Joe Biden, presiding as President of the Senate, read the certified vote tally. [ 21 ] [ 22 ]

A Sep. 2020 Gallup poll found 61% of Americans were in favor of abolishing the Electoral College, up 12 points from 2016. [ 24 ]

For the 2020 election, electors voted on Dec. 14, and delivered the results on Dec. 23. On Jan. 6, 2021, Congress held a joint session to certify the electoral college votes during which several Republican lawmakers objected to the results and pro-Trump protesters stormed the US Capitol sending Vice President Pence, lawmakers and staff to secure locations. The votes were certified in the early hours of Jan. 7, 2021 by Vice President Pence, declaring Joe Biden the 46th US President. President Joe Biden was inaugurated with Vice President Kamala Harris on Jan. 20, 2021. [ 23 ] [ 26 ]

Should the United States Use the Electoral College in Presidential Elections?

Pro 1 The Electoral College ensures that that all parts of the country are involved in selecting the President of the United States. If the election depended solely on the popular vote, then candidates could limit campaigning to heavily-populated areas or specific regions. To win the election, presidential candidates need electoral votes from multiple regions and therefore they build campaign platforms with a national focus, meaning that the winner will actually be serving the needs of the entire country. Without the electoral college, groups such as Iowa farmers and Ohio factory workers would be ignored in favor of pandering to metropolitan areas with higher population densities, leaving rural areas and small towns marginalized. [ 11 ] [ 12 ] [ 13 ] Tina Mulally, South Dakota Representative, stated that the Electoral College protects small state and minority interests and that a national popular vote would be ““like two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner.” Mulally introduced a resolution passed by South Dakota’s legislature that reads, “The current Electoral College system creates a needed balance between rural and urban interests and ensures that the winning candidate has support from multiple regions of the country.” [ 32 ] Read More

Pro 2 The Electoral College was created to protect the voices of the minority from being overwhelmed by the will of the majority. The Founding Fathers wanted to balance the will of the populace against the risk of “tyranny of the majority,” in which the voices of the masses can drown out minority interests. [ 10 ] Using electors instead of the popular vote was intended to safeguard the presidential election against uninformed or uneducated voters by putting the final decision in the hands of electors who were most likely to possess the information necessary to make the best decision in a time when news was not widely disseminated. [ 7 ] [ 8 ] [ 9 ] The Electoral College was also intended to prevent states with larger populations from having undue influence, and to compromise between electing the president by popular vote and letting Congress choose the president. [ 7 ] [ 8 ] [ 9 ] According to Alexander Hamilton, the Electoral College is if “not perfect, it is at least excellent,” because it ensured “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” [ 7 ] Democratic Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak vetoed a measure in 2019 that would add the state to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would have obligated the state’s electors to vote for the popular vote winner. Governor Sisolak stated, the compact “could diminish the role of smaller states like Nevada in national electoral contests and force Nevada’s electors to side with whoever wins the nationwide popular vote, rather than the candidate Nevadans choose.” [ 31 ] Hans von Spakovsky, Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former commissioner for the FEC, explained, “The Framers’ fears of a ‘tyranny of the majority’ is still very relevant today. One can see its importance in the fact that despite Hillary Clinton’s national popular vote total, she won only about a sixth of the counties nationwide, with her support limited mostly to urban areas on both coasts.” [ 34 ] Read More

Pro 3 The Electoral College can preclude calls for recounts or demands for run-off elections, giving certainty to presidential elections. If the election were based on popular vote, it would be possible for a candidate to receive the highest number of popular votes without actually obtaining a majority. [ 11 ] This happened with President Nixon in 1968 and President Clinton in 1992, when both men won the most electoral votes while receiving just 43% of the popular vote. The existence of the Electoral College precluded calls for recounts or demands for run-off elections. [ 11 ] Richard A. Posner, judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, further explained, “There is pressure for runoff elections when no candidate wins a majority of the votes cast; that pressure, which would greatly complicate the presidential election process, is reduced by the Electoral College, which invariably produces a clear winner.” [ 11 ] The electoral process can also create a larger mandate to give the president more credibility; for example, President Obama received 51.3% of the popular vote in 2012 but 61.7% of the electoral votes. [ 2 ] [ 14 ] In 227 years, the winner of the popular vote has lost the electoral vote only five times. This proves the system is working. [ 2 ] [ 14 ] Read More

Con 1 The Electoral College gives too much power to swing states and allows the presidential election to be decided by a handful of states. The two main political parties can count on winning the electoral votes in certain states, such as California for the Democratic Party and Indiana for the Republican Party, without worrying about the actual popular vote totals. Because of the Electoral College, presidential candidates only need to pay attention to a limited number of states that can swing one way or the other. [ 18 ] A Nov. 6, 2016 episode of PBS NewsHour revealed that “Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have made more than 90% of their campaign stops in just 11 so-called battleground states. Of those visits, nearly two-thirds took place in the four battlegrounds with the most electoral votes — Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina.” [ 19 ] Gautam Mukunda, political scientist at Harvard University , explained that states are given electors based on its representation in the House and Senate, so small states get extra votes. Mukunda stated, “The fact that in presidential elections people in Wyoming have [nearly four] times the power of people in California is antithetical at the most basic level to what we say we stand for as a democracy.” [ 33 ] Read More

Con 2 The Electoral College is rooted in slavery and racism. The “minority” interests the Founding Fathers intended the Electoral College to protect were those of slaveowners and states with legal slavery. James Madison stated, “There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.” [ 29 ] As Wilfred Wilfred Codrington III, Assistant Professor at Brooklyn Law School and a fellow at the Brennan Center, explained, “Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president… With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise [counting only 3/5 of the enslaved population instead of the population as a whole] as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.” [ 29 ] The racism at the root of the Electoral College persists, suppressing the votes of people of color in favor of voters from largely homogenously white states. [ 29 ] [ 30 ] Read More

Con 3 Democracy should function on the will of the people, allowing one vote per adult. There are over an estimated 332 million people in the United States, with population estimates predicting almost 342 million by 2024, the next presidential election. But just 538 people decide who will be president; that’s about 0.000156% of the population deciding the president. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than one million votes, yet still lost the election on electoral votes. [ 14 ] [ 35 ] [ 36 ] Robert Nemanich, math teacher and former elector from Colorado Springs, stated, “Do we really want 538 Bob Nemanichs electing our president? …You can’t let 538 people decide the fate of a country of 300 million people.” [ 28 ] Even President Donald Trump, who benefitted from the Electoral College system, stated after the 2016 election that he believes presidents should be chosen by popular vote: “I would rather see it where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win.” Just as in 2000 when George W. Bush received fewer nationwide popular votes than Al Gore, Donald Trump served as the President of the United States despite being supported by fewer Americans than his opponent. [ 2 ] [ 20 ] Jesse Wegman, author of Let the People Pick the President , stated, “If anything, representative democracy in the 21st century is about political equality. It’s about one person, one vote — everybody’s vote counting equally. You’re not going to convince a majority of Americans that that’s not how you should do it.” [ 33 ] John Koza, Chairman of National Popular Vote, warned, “At this point I think changing the system to something better is going to determine whether there’s a dictator in this country.” [ 27 ] Read More

Discussion Questions

1. Should the Electoral College be abolished? Why or why not?

2. Should the Electoral College be modified? How and why? Or why not?

3. What other voting reforms would you make? Rank choice voting? Voter ID laws? Make a list and offer support for each reform. If you would not change the voting process, make a list of reforms and why you would not choose to enact them.

Take Action

1. Listen to a Constitution Center podcast exploring the pros and cons of the Electoral College.

2. Explore the Electoral College via the US National Archives .

3. Consider the American Bar Association’s fact check on whether the Electoral College can be abolished.

4. Consider how you felt about the issue before reading this article. After reading the pros and cons on this topic, has your thinking changed? If so, how? List two to three ways. If your thoughts have not changed, list two to three ways your better understanding of the “other side of the issue” now helps you better argue your position.

5. Push for the position and policies you support by writing US national senators and representatives .

More Election Debate Topics

Should People Who Have Completed Felony Sentences Be Allowed to Vote?  – The pros and cons of the felon voting debate include arguments about the social contract, voting while in prison, and paying debts.

Should the Voting Age Be Lowered to 16? – Proponents say teens are knowledgeable enough to vote. Opponents say kids aren’t mature enough to vote.

Should Election Day Be Made a National Holiday?  – Proponents say an election day holiday will increase voter turnout. Opponents say would disadvantage low-income and blue collar workers.

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Books & Literary Life | 7.6.2020

Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?

Historian alexander keyssar on why the unpopular institution has prevailed .

Protestors demonstrate against president-elect Donald Trump on November 13, 2016, in Philadelphia.  Photograph by Mark Makela/Getty Images

The title of Alexander Keyssar’s new book— Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? —is also, he says, the question Americans ask themselves every four years. The Stirling professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School recently spoke with  Harvard Magazine  about the book and about why the Electoral College, an institution that’s been unpopular almost from the moment it was founded, has prevailed to this day.  

Harvard Magazine : What’s the origin story for your new book? How and why did this project start? 

Alexander Keyssar: The book really began, I think, after the 2000 election, when the winner of the electoral vote received only a minority of the popular vote. I began to wonder why we still have the Electoral College, what had prevented its reform or abolition. After doing a bit of reading and research, it seemed that the most standard answer to that question—that small states prevented reform—simply was not accurate. As I read about past efforts at reform, I also came to realize that those efforts were very extensive and had been going on for a very long time, which made the question all the more compelling. The question that is the title of the book is both a scholarly, analytic question, and a question about public understandings. It’s a question that several hundred million Americans ask themselves every four years. 

There is no right to vote for president guaranteed in the United States Constitution.

What do you see as the connection between this book and your earlier work, much of it focused on voting rights? 

Interestingly, when I wrote the first edition of  The Right to Vote , I said very little about the Electoral College, which then troubled me because that book was published in 2000—just before the election, in which the Electoral College played a significant role. But the Electoral College just wasn't on my mind. 

But the 2000 election made me think about what voting rights meant, given the peculiarity of the presidential election system, of the Electoral College. There was also another very specific link, which was something that arose during the dispute over the 2000 election: it became clear that individual state legislatures retained the right to choose electors by themselves, without holding popular elections. One of the Supreme Court justices—I think it was Justice Scalia—in the Supreme Court case in 2000 pointed out  there is no right to vote for president  guaranteed in the United States Constitution. So that is the intellectual link between the two books.

More than 1,000 constitutional amendments have been introduced to change the Electoral College. What are the defects in the system that have caused people to want to reform it for almost its entire existence? 

The Electoral College began to be unpopular within a few years after it was adopted. There were a number of features of [its] design that were regarded as problematic, and the foci of concern changed over time. In the early years, the central concern was the fact that each state could decide how to choose electors, which meant that it could choose all its electors by “winner-take-all,” it could have an election that allocated electors by [congressional] district, or it could have no election at all, and the state legislature would just choose electors. All of those things happened. Moreover, by the 1790s, different states started changing how they were going to choose electors from one election to the next, to game the system in a partisan fashion. By the time you get into the 1810s-1820s, you have a presidential electoral system in which there was no uniformity from state to state, and each state’s processes could (and did) change from election to election. That was regarded by large numbers of people, including members of Congress, even James Madison, as no way to run a railroad. (Admittedly, there were no railroads at the time!) What resulted was a desire to create uniformity and stability. Most leading politicians also thought that there should be district elections for electors, and the Senate approved constitutional amendments for district elections four times between 1813 and 1826. 

One set of problems, thus, had to do with the variability in how each state chose electors. That variability comes to an end by the 1830s, when just about all states adopted a winner-take-all system. Since then, there have been repeated and insistent objections to the use of winner-take-all. People just don’t think that it’s appropriate or fair to have a system in which a candidate who gets 52 percent of the popular vote in a state receives all of the electoral votes. That feature is thought of as undemocratic; and it deforms election campaigns. Other critics believed that the presence of intermediaries, meaning the electors themselves, was profoundly undemocratic and hazardous, because the will of the people could be ignored or overridden. As American political values on the whole became more democratic, the presence of any kind of intermediaries and any weighting of votes so that not all votes counted equally began to seem more and more objectionable. 

What would be the difference between district elections, which you mentioned a moment ago, and what we have now? Would electors be assigned on a district level rather than the state level? 

Exactly. Electors would be assigned according to who won the popular vote in each district, which meant that individual states would likely not wield large blocks of electoral votes. One worry about district elections, in the nineteenth century and now, is that they could readily import the problem of gerrymandering into presidential elections. 

Let me go back to your larger question of what were the things people objected to in the early decades. There was also considerable concern, as there has been only occasionally since then, about a feature of the system that’s called the contingent election system. The Constitution requires that the president receive a majority of electoral votes. If no candidate gets a majority, then the election gets turned over to the House of Representatives, using an odd formula in which every state delegation gets one vote. That part of the system greatly advantages small states because every state, no matter its size, had the same weight. This system was used in 1800, it was used in 1824, and a lot of people believed that it would be continue to be used very frequently. So that was another source of concern and desire for reform, to get rid of the contingent election system and if possible, to figure out some way to not have Congress involved at all in choosing a president. 

That particular problematic feature of the Electoral College is one that we do not pay much attention to now, because it hasn’t been deployed in a long time. But there was a lot of attention focused on it as recently as 1992, when Ross Perot ran for president. It looked for a while as though he would get enough electoral votes to toss the election into the House.

How did we get the present-day winner-take-all system? Isn’t that at odds with the reason the Electoral College was invented in the first place?

Winner-take-all was not really envisioned by the framers. When the Constitution was written, there were no political parties. It was written in the belief that there really would not be political parties and that that there should not be. If you think about the design of the Electoral College and the need to have a majority to win an election, a lot of people thought that what would happen would be that states would cast their electoral votes for four or five or six different people. Nobody would get a majority, and then it would go to the House of Representatives and they would sort it out. 

Winner-take-all emerges out of the dynamics of partisan competition. There was a famous incident in 1800, following in the wake of the previous election in 1796, when Thomas Jefferson had lost the presidency to John Adams very narrowly. Virginia’s electors were chosen through a district system, and there had been one or two Virginia electors who voted for Adams. The votes that Adams received from Virginia helped him to win the election. When the 1800 election was approaching—a replay between the same two candidates—Virginia changed its system to winner-take-all, to ensure that Jefferson would get all of [its] electoral votes. Massachusetts retaliated by doing something similar, and that same partisan logic begins to take over, extending to all states by the 1830s. The dominant political party in each state preferred having winner-take-all. Everybody at the time said that they would be happy to go to a district system if everybody else would. But they weren’t going to do it by themselves. That stance has reappeared often in more recent history.

Can you think of any society whose election system works in a way remotely comparable to ours?

I can’t say that there isn’t one or that there hasn’t ever been. But our electoral system is just absurdly complex and distanced from its original design and the political world that it was designed for. I don’t know of any system now that is even remotely as complicated. The complexity of the system, we don’t often think about—we often tend to think that the problematic features of it are winner-take-all, and the fact that the small states get a slight advantage in the number of electoral votes. In fact, there are other problematic features as well, such as the ability of the state legislatures to change the process and the contingent election system. To some extent these different features were designed to offset or counterbalance one another. The very complexity of the system has meant that it’s extremely difficult to change any one piece of it without changing something else. 

You’ve talked and written elsewhere about the possibility of enacting a federal law or even a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to vote. If we had such a law, could that then be the basis for challenges to the Electoral College in some way?

A federal law would not have any impact on a constitutional provision. A constitutional amendment that guarantees every American citizen of voting age the right to vote for president would in effect create a conflict between two features of the Constitution. It would create a conflict between that amendment and the current design of the Electoral College, as outlined in Article II and the Twelfth Amendment. So a national right-to-vote amendment would—at the least—compel modification of at least one piece of the Electoral College, which is the piece that says that each state legislature can decide by itself the manner in which electors will be chosen.

The number of electoral votes a state gets is not entirely in proportion to its population relative to other states. Is that a modern problem? 

That’s in the Constitution. The number of electoral votes a state gets is proportional to its number of representatives and senators. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, they had a lot of trouble figuring out how to choose the president. They didn’t have any models. They really just could not agree. The default position was that Congress would choose the president. And in a series of straw votes in the course of the summer, that was the position that had the most backing. But then within a day or two or three of these straw votes, they realized that that was actually not a good idea. Because then you don’t have separation of powers. And then the president would be beholden to Congress and that arrangement would set up all sorts of corruption.  

The framers floated a whole lot of other ideas, including having the governors choose or having a national popular vote, which James Madison supported. But they couldn’t reach agreement. It was a long hot summer in Philadelphia, everybody was tired, and at the end of the summer the convention went on vacation for a week. They left a small set of knotty, unresolved issues to a committee, the Committee on Unfinished Parts. It’s that committee which comes up with the design of the Electoral College, which, with modifications, is then adopted by the entire convention. One way to understand what the Electoral College is, by the way, is that it’s a replica of Congress in its composition. The same number of representatives and senators from each state. It’s a replica of Congress, but it does not legislate. It only meets once and only has one order of business to do, and thus the problems of corruption and lack of separation of powers are solved. What that institutional design did from the outset was give a slight advantage to small states. 

The perversity of the design of the Electoral College is that a state gets the same number of electoral votes regardless of turnout in elections and regardless of how much voter suppression it engages in.

You mentioned just now the idea of a national popular vote. Your book discusses how, before the Civil War, a national popular vote was a nonstarter for slaveholding states because, obviously, slaves wouldn’t be allowed to vote, and the voting power of southern states relative to other states would be diminished. What about after the Civil War? Why and how did race continue to play a role in opposition to a national popular vote?

After the Civil War, after a period of contestation and Reconstruction, white supremacist governments returned to power in the South, and they disenfranchised African Americans who had been voting and wielding some political power. Thereafter the South, in terms of representation, benefits not from the [Constitution’s]  three-fifths  clause, but effectively from a  five-fifths  clause. In other words, southern states get electoral votes in proportion to their entire black populations, but that population is not allowed to vote. Given that situation, the white South is fiercely resistant to a national popular vote, because it would do one of two things or perhaps both. It would put pressure on a state to try to maintain its political weight by enfranchising African Americans, which they did not want to do, or those states would lose influence in presidential elections, significant influence, because they would have many fewer voters. Under a national popular vote, the influence of a state is determined by the number of voters who cast ballots; under the Electoral College, it is determined by the state’s population. 

The perversity of the design of the Electoral College is that a state gets the same number of electoral votes regardless of turnout in elections and regardless of how much voter suppression it engages in. There was only one southerner from 1890 to the 1960s who introduced an amendment calling for a national popular vote, and he ends up being pilloried for it. By the late 1940s, it’s become a common view that the Electoral College is key to protecting the “southern way of life.” In the end, at the moment at which the United States comes closest to adopting a national popular vote, which is in 1969-70, a constitutional amendment passes the House by an 82 percent vote, but when it gets to the Senate it is defeated by a filibuster by southern segregationist senators. The amendment’s sponsors needed a two-thirds vote to end the filibuster, which meant that all it took was 34 senators to stop the national popular vote amendment.  

I don’t think most people know that we almost got rid of the Electoral College in the late ’60s. 

Do you have a point of view about whether and how we ought to reform the Electoral College?   

My view is that our electoral system should embody certain key values. One is that all votes should count equally. No matter where you live, no matter who you are, all votes should count the same. The system should also be stable in the sense of not changing, not varying from one election to the next. And it should be transparent. The principles on which it’s constructed should be transparent and widely regarded as fair by the public. Based on those values, I certainly think that the ideal system would be to have a national popular vote.  

Until the 2000 election, it was widely believed that if there was a “wrong winner” election, we’d get rid of the Electoral College.

Do you think that if we continue seeing “wrong winner” elections, it will eventually force a full-blown legitimacy crisis? How long can that keep happening without something breaking? 

Very well said. Until the 2000 election, it was widely believed that if there was a “wrong winner” election, we’d get rid of the Electoral College. That’s what everybody was saying in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. Well, we didn’t get rid of it after 2000, and then, of course, we got 2016—when the gap between the popular and electoral votes was much larger than in 2000. I think that with the election of President Trump, and in part because of the nature of his presidency, we already have the beginnings of a legitimacy crisis. I think it would be intensified if it were to happen again. In the last few pages of the book I ruminate about this a bit. In an era of very sharp political polarization, you want to have an electoral system that is understood to be principled and fair. A lot of people doubt that now. 

To bring current events back full circle to some of the earlier history from your book, I was struck by some rhetoric of segregationist southern politicians about what would happen if there were a national popular vote. They’d say that their votes were going to be “debauched” by the votes of undesirables (i.e., black voters). It’s impossible not to connect that to present-day rhetoric about voter fraud. 

Yes, I think there is a direct line that goes from those kinds of sentiments to some of the support for Trump. 

Anything else you’d like to add?

I want to emphasize that one of the discoveries that propelled me forward in [writing] the book, and that I think is very important, is that—contrary to conventional wisdom—the primary obstacle to reforming the Electoral College has not been the small states. The “small state” explanation has been conventional wisdom for about 40 years, and it was widely believed in the 1940s and 1950s as well. This view that the small states have prevented reform because of the additional electoral vote weight that they get is simply not true. It’s not true in terms of who the leaders in the movements for change were, and it’s  not  true in terms of the roll call votes when proposals for a national popular vote came to a vote in Congress.

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The Electoral College Explained

A national popular vote would help ensure that every vote counts equally, making American democracy more representative.

• Electoral College Reform

In the United States, the presidency is decided not by the national popular vote but by the Electoral College — an outdated and convoluted system that sometimes yields results contrary to the choice of the majority of American voters. On five occasions, including in two of the last six elections, candidates have won the Electoral College, and thus the presidency, despite losing the nationwide popular vote. 

The Electoral College has racist origins — when established, it applied the three-fifths clause, which gave a long-term electoral advantage to slave states in the South — and continues to dilute the political power of voters of color. It incentivizes presidential campaigns to focus on a relatively small number of “swing states.” Together, these dynamics have spurred debate about the system’s democratic legitimacy.

To make the United States a more representative democracy, reformers are pushing for the presidency to be decided instead by the national popular vote, which would help ensure that every voter counts equally.

What is the Electoral College and how does it work?

The Electoral College is a group of intermediaries designated by the Constitution to select the president and vice president of the United States. Each of the 50 states is allocated presidential electors  equal to the number of its representatives and senators . The ratification of the 23rd Amendment in 1961 allowed citizens in the District of Columbia to participate in presidential elections as well; they have consistently had three electors.

In total, the Electoral College comprises  538 members . A presidential candidate must win a majority of the electoral votes cast to win — at least 270 if all 538 electors vote.

The Constitution grants state legislatures the power to decide how to appoint their electors. Initially, a number of state legislatures directly  selected their electors , but during the 19th century they transitioned to the popular vote, which is now used by  all 50 states . In other words, each awards its electoral votes to the presidential candidate chosen by the state’s voters.

Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia use a winner-take-all system, awarding all of their electoral votes to the popular vote winner in the state. Maine and Nebraska award one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each of their congressional districts and their remaining two electoral votes to the statewide winner. Under this system, those two states sometimes split their electoral votes among candidates.

In the months leading up to the general election, the political parties in each state typically nominate their own slates of would-be electors. The state’s popular vote determines which party’s slates will be made electors. Members of the Electoral College  meet and vote in their respective states  on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December after Election Day. Then, on January 6, a joint session of Congress meets at the Capitol to count the electoral votes and declare the outcome of the election, paving the way for the presidential inauguration on January 20.

How was the Electoral College established?

The Constitutional Convention in 1787 settled on the Electoral College as a compromise between delegates who thought Congress should select the president and others who favored a direct nationwide popular vote. Instead, state legislatures were entrusted with appointing electors.

Article II  of the Constitution, which established the executive branch of the federal government, outlined the framers’ plan for the electing the president and vice president. Under this plan, each elector cast two votes for president; the candidate who received the most votes became the president, with the second-place finisher becoming vice president — which led to administrations in which political opponents served in those roles. The process was overhauled in 1804 with the ratification of the  12th Amendment , which required electors to cast votes separately for president and vice president. 

How did slavery shape the Electoral College?

At the time of the Constitutional Convention, the northern states and southern states had  roughly equal populations . However, nonvoting enslaved people made up about one-third of the southern states’ population. As a result, delegates from the South objected to a direct popular vote in presidential elections, which would have given their states less electoral representation.

The debate contributed to the convention’s eventual decision to establish the Electoral College, which applied the  three-fifths compromise  that had already been devised for apportioning seats in the House of Representatives. Three out of five enslaved people were counted as part of a state’s total population, though they were nonetheless prohibited from voting.

Wilfred U. Codrington III, an assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School and a Brennan Center fellow,  writes  that the South’s electoral advantage contributed to an “almost uninterrupted trend” of presidential election wins by southern slaveholders and their northern sympathizers throughout the first half of the 19th century. After the Civil War, in 1876, a contested Electoral College outcome was settled by a compromise in which the House awarded Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency with the understanding that he would withdraw military forces from the Southern states. This led to the end of Reconstruction and paved the way for racial segregation under Jim Crow laws.

Today, Codrington argues, the Electoral College continues to dilute the political power of Black voters: “Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. … Under the Electoral College, black votes are submerged.”

What are faithless electors?  

Ever since the 19th century reforms, states have expected their electors to honor the will of the voters. In other words, electors are now pledged to vote for the winner of the popular vote in their state. However, the Constitution does not require them to do so, which allows for scenarios in which “faithless electors” have voted against the popular vote winner in their states. As of 2016, there have been  90 faithless electoral votes  cast out of 23,507 in total across all presidential elections. The 2016 election saw a record-breaking  seven faithless electors , including three who voted for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was not a presidential candidate at the time.  

Currently, 33 states and the District of Columbia  require their presidential electors  to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged. Only 5 states, however, impose a penalty on faithless electors, and only 14 states provide for faithless electors to be removed or for their votes to be canceled. In July 2020, the Supreme Court  unanimously upheld  existing state laws that punish or remove faithless electors.

What happens if no candidate wins a majority of Electoral College votes?

If no ticket wins a majority of Electoral College votes, the presidential election is  sent to the House of Representatives  for a runoff. Unlike typical House practice, however, each state only gets one vote, decided by the party that controls the state’s House delegation. Meanwhile, the vice-presidential race is decided in the Senate, where each member has one vote. This scenario  has not transpired since 1836 , when the Senate was tasked with selecting the vice president after no candidate received a majority of electoral votes.

Are Electoral College votes distributed equally between states?

Each state is allocated a number of electoral votes based on the total size of its congressional delegation. This benefits smaller states, which have at least three electoral votes — including two electoral votes tied to their two Senate seats, which are guaranteed even if they have a small population and thus a small House delegation. Based on population trends, those disparities will likely increase as the most populous states are expected to account for an even greater share of the U.S. population in the decades ahead. 

What did the 2020 election reveal about the Electoral College?

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential race, Donald Trump and his allies fueled an effort to overturn the results of the election, spreading repeated lies about widespread voter fraud. This included attempts by a number of state legislatures to nullify some of their states’ votes, which often targeted jurisdictions with large numbers of Black voters. Additionally, during the certification process for the election, some members of Congress also objected to the Electoral College results, attempting to throw out electors from certain states. While these efforts ultimately failed, they revealed yet another vulnerability of the election system that stems from the Electoral College.

The  Electoral Count Reform Act , enacted in 2023, addresses these problems. Among other things, it clarifies which state officials have the power to appoint electors, and it bars any changes to that process after Election Day, preventing state legislatures from setting aside results they do not like. The new law also raises the threshold for consideration of objections to electoral votes. It is now one-fifth of each chamber instead of one senator and one representative.  Click here for more on the changes made by the Electoral Count Reform Act.

What are ways to reform the Electoral College to make presidential elections more democratic?

Abolishing the Electoral College outright would require a constitutional amendment. As a workaround, scholars and activist groups have rallied behind the  National Popular Vote Interstate Compact  (NPV), an effort that started after the 2000 election. Under it, participating states would  commit to awarding their electoral votes  to the winner of the national popular vote.

In other words, the NPV would formally retain the Electoral College but render it moot, ensuring that the winner of the national popular vote also wins the presidency. If enacted, the NPV would incentivize presidential candidates to expand their campaign efforts nationwide, rather than focus only on a small number of swing states.

For the NPV to take effect, it must first be adopted by states that control at least 270 electoral votes. In 2007, Maryland became the first state to enact the compact. As of 2019, a total of 19 states and Washington, DC, which collectively account for 196 electoral votes, have joined.

The public has consistently supported a nationwide popular vote. A 2020 poll by Pew Research Center, for example, found that  58 percent of adults  prefer a system in which the presidential candidate who receives the most votes nationwide wins the presidency.

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Should We Abolish the Electoral College?

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Editor’s Note : In 2016, we asked two professors to debate whether the Electoral College should cease to be the mechanism used for selecting the U.S. president. Here are the yea and the nay.

By Jack Rakove, the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and a professor of political science.

In this extraordinarily strange election year, debating the Electoral College might seem an odd pastime when so many other issues concern us. But its logic, its distortion of the democratic process and its underlying flaws will still strongly influence the conduct of the election. So, let me make the case for its abolition and its replacement by a simple national popular vote, to be held in an entity we will call (what the heck) the United States of America.

There are three basic arguments in favor of the system the framers of the Constitution gave us, with little sense of how it would actually work. The first is easily dismissed. Presidential electors are not more qualified than other citizens to determine who should head the government. They are simply party loyalists who do not deliberate about anything more than where to eat lunch.

A second argument holds less populous states deserve the further electoral weight they gain through the “senatorial bump” giving each state two electors, because their minority status entitles them to additional political protection. But the real interests of small-state voters are never determined by the relative size of the population of their states. If, say, environmental sustainability or abortion or the Second Amendment is your dominant concern, it does not matter whether you live in Wyoming or California, Pennsylvania or Delaware. The size of a state does not affect our real political preferences, even though the Electoral College system imagines that it does.

Third, defenders of the Electoral College also claim that it supports the underlying value of federalism. Having the states play an autonomous role in presidential elections, it is said, reinforces the division of governing authority between the nation and the states. But explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery. Having a state-based system for electing both houses of Congress should be adequate to that task. Presidential elections have little if anything to do with the subject, even when some candidates claim to be “running against Washington.”

What are the positive arguments in favor of replacing the existing electoral system with a national popular vote? Here, again, there are three main points to make.

Having the states play an autonomous role in presidential elections, it is said, reinforces the division of governing authority between the nation and the states. But explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery.

First, and most obviously, such a system would conform to the dominant democratic value that has prevailed in American politics ever since the one-person, one-vote reapportionment rulings of the early 1960s. Our votes would count the same wherever they were cast. No other mode of presidential elections would be fully consistent with our underlying commitment to the equality of all citizens.

Second, a national popular vote would eliminate the “battleground state” phenomenon that has now become the key feature of post-convention campaigning, leaving most Americans alienated from the decisive phase of presidential elections. “Swing” or “battleground” states are mere accidents of geography. They do not matter because they have any special civic characteristics. They simply happen to be states that become competitive because of their demography, and which are readily identifiable as such because of the increasing sophistication of political polling. In a truly national election, parties and candidates would have the incentive to turn out their votes wherever they were, fostering a deeper sense of engagement across the whole population.

Third, a national election might provide a cure for the delegitimation of presidential authority that has afflicted the last three presidencies. It is no secret that the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all suffered, from the outset, from efforts to imply that there was something improper and unworthy or even suspicious in their elections. That same view will doubtless color the 2016 election as well. This perception is reinforced by the red- and blue-state imagery that controls our view of the electoral process. Having an election in which victory went to a candidate carrying a single national constituency might not wholly cure this problem, but it might well work to mitigate it.

By Michael W. McConnell, the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law, director of the Constitutional Law Center and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

The Electoral College is not going to be changed, and there are far more urgent and promising topics for reform of our presidential selection system.

It is true that the Electoral College no longer serves its original purposes, and that it creates a grave risk that a candidate not favored by a majority of the people will, from time to time, be elected president. There have been three: John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush. We survived. Not one was a first-rank president, but their selection did not seriously injure the democratic character of our system.

The founders opted for the Electoral College because the two leading alternatives, election by Congress and by popular vote, were thought to have serious defects. Moreover, the electoral college method preserved the two compromises over representation—the three-fifths clause and the big state-small state compromise—and guarded against a fracturing of votes for many candidates, which they thought might occur once George Washington was no longer available as a nationally respected consensus candidate. The three-fifths clause became irrelevant with the end of slavery (thankfully!), and the big state-small state divide no longer animates our politics, if it ever did. The two-party system solves the fractured vote problem more effectively than the Electoral College ever did, and the electors never exercised genuine independence. The Electoral College thus presents democratic risks without serving any of its original purposes.

That is not to say the Electoral College is without its advantages. It gives a slight edge to candidates with broad-based support in many states over those who rack up huge majorities in just a few large states. That probably promotes a more national and less regional vision. It channels presidential politics into a two-party system, which is superior to multiparty systems where fringe factions can exercise too much leverage. It probably reduces the cost of presidential campaigns by confining television advertising to the battleground states (and spares the rest of us the tedium of endless repetitive ads). And it confines vote-counting disputes to just one, or maybe a few, states. Imagine a Florida-style recount in every precinct in America.

Still, the advantages are uncertain and relatively minor. Almost no one would adopt an Electoral College today if we were starting from scratch. But reforming the Electoral College does not rank high among our national problems. Given that a change would require a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures, it is not going to happen. We should be talking about other things.

The great problems with our presidential selection system today stem from the haphazard way we choose the two major party presidential candidates. This year is the poster child for the need for reform. The two parties have chosen the same year in which to nominate a person whom large numbers of Americans, probably a majority, regard as unfit (though not for the same reason). Generally, we count on the Republican and Democratic parties to nominate not the best people, but candidates who combine a degree of popular support with the experience and temperament to govern. Not this year.

Almost no one would adopt an Electoral College today if we were starting from scratch. But reforming the Electoral College does not rank high among our national problems.

We need to think hard, and quickly, about how to reform three aspects of the presidential nomination process: the debates, the primary elections and the conventions. The current system is weighted too heavily in favor of celebrity appeal, demagogic displays and appeals to narrow special interests. The party structures—which, for all their faults, have a vested interest in candidates from the moderate middle who are able to work with Congress and other officials to govern—have been sidelined.

For almost the first half century of the republic, presidential candidates were chosen by the caucuses of the two parties in the House and the Senate. That system worked well until the two-party system briefly died with the Federalist Party. It was replaced by party conventions, which eventually were replaced (almost) with strings of single or multiple state primaries and caucuses. It seems to me that the original system may have been superior to what we now have. The elected officials of both parties have incentives to choose candidates with an eye toward popular electability and governing skill. Interestingly, the congressional caucus system is very close to the system the British used to replace Prime Minister David Cameron. Most Americans would breathe a sigh of relief, I believe, if we had a system capable of choosing the U.S. equivalent of Theresa May instead of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Now is the time for sober and spirited citizens from both parties to devise a new system for 2020.

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Watch CBS News

Why does America have the Electoral College — and should we keep it?

By Justin Sherman

March 18, 2021 / 7:00 AM EDT / CBS News

Watch the CBSN Originals documentary " Do We Still Need the Electoral College? " in the video player above. 

When Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, he became the fourth president in American history — and the second since 2000 — to win a presidential election despite losing the popular vote. Clinton received nearly 3 million more votes nationwide. But in the Electoral College — which ultimately decides who wins the presidency — Mr. Trump received 306 votes to Clinton's 232. In 2020 , despite Joe Biden 's commanding 7 million vote lead in the popular vote , just a few thousand votes in key states could have swung the election for Donald Trump.

Cases like these have fueled efforts to reform the Electoral College or do away with it entirely, but some say it still serves an important purpose.

How did we end up with this system for choosing a president? Stanford University professor of history and political science Jack Rakove says the Founding Fathers had little precedent for the institution they were creating. 

"Executive power in the 18th century was either monarchical, king-like, or ministerial, the sense of a British Cabinet," Rakove explained. "So you had to create an office that was completely new." 

The founders considered three main proposals for electing the president: direct democracy, election by Congress, and an election by state-based electors. 

Option 1: Direct democracy

The idea of direct democracy — whoever gets the most votes, wins — was appealing to many of the founders. In states like New York and Massachusetts, direct democracy was already being used to elect governors. However, it was unclear how voters of that era would be able to identify qualified national political figures, and some worried that the general population would be too ill-informed to take on the responsibility of choosing the president. 

"The problem was what you could do at the state level might not be transferable to the national level," Rakove said. "The thing that happens from the 1790s on is that the growth of the popular press, and the growth of an evolving political press, where newspapers are committed to particular candidates or particular parties, became a prominent feature of American politics."

For the founders coming from Southern states, direct democracy would also mean that executive power would likely be dominated by the North because it had a larger voting bloc. At the time of the constitutional convention, nearly 40% of people living in the South were enslaved Black people who were not allowed to vote. 

"A big part of the Southern population consisted of African American slaves, who have no political existence whatsoever," Rakove said. "If you have a truly popular election for a single officer chosen from the whole nation, there would be a big regional disadvantage for the South."

Option 2: Election by Congress

For Southern states at the time, having Congress choose the president would solve both of their main concerns with direct democracy. Congressional representatives, the country's political elite, would have no problem identifying qualified national political figures. 

And Congress had also already addressed potential Northern dominance with the so-called three-fifths compromise. The compromise stated that 60% of a state's enslaved population would be counted towards the state's total population for the purpose of allocating seats  in Congress — giving Southern states more political clout.

"That was emboldening and empowering the South," said Wilfred Codrington III, an associate professor of law at Brooklyn College. "It really disincentivized the desire to get rid of slavery because the more slaves you had, the more political power you had."

A presidential election by Congress, however, would infringe on the founders' desire to establish a separation of powers. 

"If we have a congressional election and the president is ambitious then the president will become, in their terms, the lackey or the tool, the toady of Congress," Rakove said.

Option 3: A system of electors

The compromise that was eventually enshrined in the Constitution is a system of state-based electors based roughly on state population. For the founders, this solved a whole array of potential problems: the risk of leaving too much power in the hands of an ill-informed public, Northern dominance of the executive branch, and breaching the separation of powers. 

"The upshot is the system having presidential electors became attractive, not because it was attractive in itself, but because it was the least unattractive option," Rakove said.

The Constitution specifies that each state gets same number of electors as its total number of representatives and senators in Congress, and the founders left it up to the states to determine how to they would choose their electors. All but two states —  Maine and Nebraska — have adopted a winner-take-all system that awards all their electoral votes to whichever candidate won the popular vote in the state.

Pros and cons in modern America

Advocates of the Electoral College celebrate its check on the power that large cities would have in a purely popular vote election. 

Tara Ross, author of "The Indispensable Electoral College," says it forces presidential candidates to court the votes of a more diverse electorate across the country.

"We have a system where you have to win simultaneous victories in multiple parts of the country and the only way to get there is to build the biggest coalition you can," Ross said. "Because of the Electoral College, presidential candidates serve themselves best if they try to appeal to a wide variety of people." 

But in recent years, as discrepancies between electoral votes and the popular vote have become more common, reform efforts have gained momentum. Electoral College reformers and opponents say the system is confusing, outdated and anti-democratic.

Critics note that states with small populations have disproportionately more clout under the current system. And the winner-take-all rules mean a handful of battleground states have an outsized influence on determining the winner, leading presidential candidates to devote much of their campaigning to just a few states.

One leading reform initiative is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact , which calls on states to agree to allocate their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote. So far, 15 states and Washington, D.C. have signed on — not enough for it to take effect.

Saul Anuzis, a former chair of the Michigan Republican Party who now works with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, says determining the president by who wins the popular vote would be more truly democratic and could help restore public confidence in the system.

"I think unfortunately too many people in this country think their vote doesn't matter," Anuzis said. "I think that has a horrible effect on politics in those states that are ignored, as well as public policy."

Malcolm Kenyatta, a Pennsylvania state legislator who served as a presidential elector in 2020, has seen the system from the inside and thinks it needs to change.

"The Electoral College sets up a system where every vote is not equal. And a vote in one place is more important than a vote somewhere else. That's unfair," he said.

Kenyatta believes our democracy will only endure if we work towards improving the institutions it relies on. 

"I think we don't always think about the fact that this thing that we're doing, it's an experiment," he said. "There's nothing written on some tablet somewhere that says America has to succeed. It happens because every generation recognizes the role we play in ensuring that there's something to pass on."

• United States Electoral College

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• HISTORY & CULTURE

Here’s why the Electoral College exists—and how it could be reformed

Controversial since its creation, this U.S. institution has elected five presidents who didn’t win a majority of votes and has even resulted in one tie.

Born of compromise and enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the Electoral College isn’t a place. It’s a temporary voting body that elects the president of the United States. When voters select their presidential and vice-presidential candidates on Election Day, they’re actually choosing the members of this body who will cast votes on their behalf in the days and weeks after the election.

For the past 233 years, this confusing and contentious institution has split opinions and overseen some truly rocky presidential elections. It has elected five presidents who didn’t win a majority of American votes and resulted in one tie. And though most electors vote for their pledged candidates, some have historically gone back on their promises.

Every four years, debate revives over the efficacy, equality, and even necessity of this electoral system. Here’s what you need to know about how it came about, how it works, and the proposals for Electoral College reform.

The Electoral College and the Constitution

The Electoral College is the result of a series of compromises struck during the grueling Constitutional Convention of 1787. Delegates quibbled over , and discarded, a variety of ways to elect a president. Some believed citizens should vote directly while others argued that Congress should decide. Still others insisted this would give the national legislative body too much power and that the decision should lie with the states. But that was contentious, too, because delegates couldn’t agree on what role, if any, state legislators and governors should play in the process.

Giving states electoral power also raised the question of how less populous states would be represented. This was a sticking point among Southern slaveholding states, which lacked the population of their northern neighbors. Delegates from those states insisted that their enslaved residents, who were not considered citizens and would not be allowed to vote, be counted for the purpose of allocating electoral votes.

Finally, the framers hit on a solution that balanced all of these factors. Article II of the Constitution holds that each state should appoint electors equal to the number of its U.S. senators and representatives. While the size of the House of Representatives would be based on population—as determined by the U.S. Census—each state received two senators to give a small bump in power to less populous states.

The question of how to count enslaved people resulted in the notorious Three-Fifths Compromise, which determined that three out of every five slaves would be counted as persons for congressional representation, taxation, and the Electoral College.

One point that the Founding Fathers didn’t consider during their deliberations was how to distinguish between ballots for the president and vice president. This flaw would become obvious in the nation’s fourth election in 1800, which resulted in a tie between presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr. The contest was thrown to the U.S. House of Representatives, which ultimately selected Jefferson after deadlocking 35 times. In 1804, the 12th Amendment was passed to create separate votes for presidents and vice presidents in the Electoral College.

Then there was the matter of who was qualified to be an elector. The Constitution originally provided only that electors couldn’t be members of Congress or federal employees and left it up to the states to decide who they would choose and how.

In 1868, however, the 14 th Amendment added a requirement that electors can’t have participated in a rebellion against the United States or have aided its enemies. More notably, it also negated the Three-Fifths Compromise by conferring citizenship on formerly enslaved people at the end of the Civil War, ensuring that each individual would be counted.

How states allocate electoral votes

States’ approaches to their electors varied from the start. At first , Connecticut, South Carolina, and Georgia’s state legislatures appointed electors directly, while other states let citizens decide. But as political factions grew, states’ procedures changed and slowly shifted this role to political parties. Now, political parties select a slate of people in each state who will stand as electors for the party’s candidate.

In the 2020 election, there will be 538 electors. To win the election, a candidate must win a majority—270 electoral votes.

To win the election, a candidate must win a majority—270 electoral votes.

State rules vary on how to allocate electoral votes. In the winner-take-all system, which is in effect in 48 states and the District of Columbia, all of the state’s electoral votes are allocated to the slate of electors chosen by the political party of the candidate who won the state’s popular vote.

Maine and Nebraska assign electoral votes by congressional district, a system that has resulted in one split election in each state. In 2008, Democrat Barack Obama won the electoral vote in the Nebraska congressional district that covers Omaha and its suburbs, while Republican John McCain won the rest of the state. In 2016, Republican Donald Trump won the electoral vote in the less populous district that covers most of Maine, and Democrat Hillary Clinton won the other district and the state’s popular vote.

In 2019, Maine became the only state to adopt a ranked-choice system in which voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority, the votes are then tabulated in rounds, and the lowest-ranked candidates are eliminated until only two are left. In the final round, the candidate with 50 percent or more of the vote wins.

Counting the votes

Though a candidate usually declares victory or concedes on Election Night, the returns reported by the media immediately after the election are only preliminary. The official count comes later, when the electors cast their official votes.

After Election Day, which takes place on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, states use the remainder of November and December to gather, certify, and send their electors’ formal votes for president and vice president to the National Archives and Records Administration, which administers the Electoral College.

The votes are counted in a joint session of Congress on January 6. The sitting vice president —who is also president of the Senate—presides over the session, opening the votes, reading them aloud, and passing them to two “tellers” from each chamber who count them. If one candidate receives 270 or more electoral votes, the vice president announces the results—including, sometimes, their own win or loss.

Members of Congress can object to individual electors’ returns or states’ overall returns. If a written objection is signed by at least one senator and one member of the House of Representatives, it bumps the session to a recess. The two houses then debate the objections and vote on whether to accept or reject them. Both houses must agree to reject the returns to exclude them from the final tally.

Democratic Representative Maxine Waters holds up an objection to the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2017. Formal objections require the endorsement of one member from each house of Congress. Waters didn't receive the support of any senators, and Congress certified Donald Trump's presidential victory over Hillary Clinton, with then-Vice President Joe Biden pronouncing, "It is over."

Such formal objections have only occurred twice in history. In 1969, two members of Congress objected to a vote that had been cast by a “faithless elector,” an elector who was expected to vote in favor of Republican Richard Nixon but instead cast it for Democrat George Wallace. In 2005, two Democratic members objected to all 20 of Ohio’s votes in favor of incumbent President George W. Bush, claiming that the state’s voting process had been flawed. Both objections failed and the election results were unchanged.

The Electoral College and the popular vote

Although there hasn’t been a tie in the Electoral College since Jefferson and his running mate Burr split the votes in 1800, the U.S. House of Representatives was called in to decide the vote for a second and last time in 1824. At the time, the Democratic-Republican party had fragmented, and no candidate won the majority of the electoral votes. Ultimately, the House of Representatives chose John Quincy Adams instead of Andrew Jackson, who had won the popular vote.

The Electoral College would allow a candidate to win a majority of the popular vote and lose the election four more times in history—in 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016.

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In 1876, Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden won the popular vote but lost to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by a single electoral vote. Disputed returns from three states led to the creation of a bipartisan commission that awarded the election to Hayes in 1877, but Southern Democrats only accepted the results when Republicans promised that federal troops would leave the South, effectively ending the period of federal intervention in the post-Civil War South known as Reconstruction. Hayes was declared the victor in Congress just two days before his term began.

Congress passed the 1887 Electoral Count Act a decade later to avoid such protracted disputes by setting the deadlines and vote-counting procedures that are still used today, but that didn’t resolve the bigger issue. In 1888, Democratic incumbent Grover Cleveland won the majority of the popular vote, but lost to Republican nominee Benjamin Harrison in the Electoral College 233 to 168.

In 2000, Democratic Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote for president by more than half a million votes. But he lost the Electoral College to Republican candidate George W. Bush 271 to 266 after the U.S. Supreme Court halted the recount of ballots in Florida, where Bush had only a narrow lead and voting irregularities had been recorded.

Sixteen years later in 2016, another Democratic candidate won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College when Hillary Clinton lost to Republican challenger Donald Trump. Clinton had a 2.86 million vote lead and 48 percent of the popular vote, but only garnered 232 electoral votes to Trump’s 306.

Unpledged and faithless electors

There has also been controversy over the electors themselves. In some elections, state parties have selected unpledged electors—electors who can vote for any candidate regardless of party affiliation. This practice was primarily used in the mid-20 th century in Southern states whose conservative Democratic Party members wanted to express their displeasure with national party platforms that challenged segregation.

On the eve of the Electoral College vote in 2016, a protestor in Colorado urges the state's electors not to cast their votes for President-elect Donald Trump. Most electors vote for the candidate to whom they've pledged support but some have been known to switch loyalties.

However, the only time these unpledged electors have been elected to the Electoral College was in 1960, when 15 unpledged Democratic electors from Mississippi and Alabama cast votes for Southern Democrat Harry Byrd instead of John F. Kennedy, the national Democratic candidate who ultimately won the election. The practice died out after the 1960s, when conservative Southerners moved their loyalties to the Republican Party.

But most electors do promise to vote a certain way in the Electoral College—and when they go against those pledges, they earn the moniker “faithless.” Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia have laws that require electors to abide by their pledges. Still, there were seven faithless electoral votes cast in 20th century elections, and another seven in the contentious 2016 election alone. During that contest, five electors pledged to Democratic contender Hillary Clinton and two pledged to Republican Donald Trump successfully switched their vote to candidates who were not in the race, such as former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and moderate Republicans John Kasich and Colin Powell. In 2000, one elector from the District of Columbia cast a blank ballot in protest of the capital city’s lack of Congressional voting status . However, no election has ever been determined by a faithless elector.

In July 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states can enforce electors’ pledges by penalizing rogue electors or removing them from the slate—to the dismay of Electoral College opponents, who had hoped a Supreme Court ruling affirming electors’ rights to vote as they wish would have thrown future elections into chaos and galvanized a national movement to eliminate the Electoral College.

Is Electoral College reform possible?

According to the National Archives, more than 700 proposals to reform or abolish the Electoral College have been introduced to Congress in the past two centuries. These proposals aim to address the many factors that allow a candidate to win the majority of votes and not the presidency as well as various biases within the system.

Although the framers specifically intended to ensure less populous states had a say in elections, critics claim sparsely populated states now have an unfair advantage. By guaranteeing every state at least two electoral votes to match its senatorial representation, the system gives small states more electoral votes per capita. For example, the least populous state, Wyoming, had one electoral vote per 195,000 people in the 2016 election —and California, the most populous, had one per 712,000 people.

Legal scholars note that this bias toward small states has played a decisive role in three elections, most recently in 2000. Had Electoral College votes in that election been allocated by population without the two-vote Senate bump, Gore would have defeated Bush 225 to 211.

Critics also deride the winner-take-all approach to allocating votes as undemocratic for the way it overrides the preferences of wide swaths of a state’s voters. They argue that this system favors candidates from major parties and encourages candidates to campaign in just a few battleground states that are ideologically split and disproportionately white .

One reform proposal is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact , an agreement among states to award all of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote nationwide. Several states have passed legislation to join the compact, but it would come into effect only when participating jurisdictions represent a majority of the Electoral College. As of October 2020, it has been enacted by 15 states and the District of Columbia and needs an additional 74 electoral votes to come into effect.

There’s also a state-level push for ranked-choice voting, which is seen as a way to force candidates to court not just their tried-and-true supporters, but voters across the political spectrum. It could also help states sidestep the effects of third-party and independent voters, whose votes can siphon off support from major candidates. In 2020, Maine will become the first state to ever use this system in a presidential election.

To abolish the Electoral College, however, would require a Constitutional amendment. This onerous process requires a two-thirds majority in both chambers of Congress, or a convention requested by two-thirds of state legislatures. A Constitutional amendment must then be ratified by the legislatures of three quarters of the states.

In 1969, the House of Representatives came close when it voted to allow for the direct election of both president and vice president, with a runoff if no candidate received more than 40 percent of the vote. But the resolution didn’t pass the Senate, and nothing similar ever made it that far again.

And not everyone believes that it should. Proponents of the Electoral College argue that the system allows states to check the power of the national government and averts the possibility of nationwide recounts that could throw elections into chaos. Rather than lament the system’s bias toward small states, they argue it encourages candidates to campaign outside of highly populated urban areas.

In the most recent Pew Research Center poll on the matter, published in March 2020, 58 percent of U.S. adults said they support eliminating the current system in favor of a popular vote. That number is split along party lines: While 81 percent of Democratic-leaning respondents said they’d nix the Electoral College, only 32 percent of Republican-leaning respondents agreed.

And so, the electoral system that has vexed America since its earliest days has proven relatively durable.

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The Electoral College (Why We Use It and Why It Matters)

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On Election Day, Americans should appreciate the great and long-lasting constitutional tradition bequeathed to them—including the quirky Electoral College system created by the nation’s Founders.

The Electoral College remains in place over two centuries after the framers of the Constitution empowered it to select presidents. Though occasionally maligned, this system of electing a chief executive has been incredibly successful for the American people.

Many modern voters might be surprised to learn that when they step into a ballot box to select their candidate for president, they actually are casting a vote for fellow Americans called electors. These electors, appointed by the states, are pledged to support the presidential candidate the voters have supported. The Electoral College holds its vote the Monday after the second Wednesday in December following the election.

The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College after much debate and compromise, but it has provided stability to the process of picking presidents. Though the winner of the national popular vote typically takes the presidency, that vote failed to determine the winner in four elections: 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000 .

Some see the Electoral College as a peculiar and mystifying institution that ensures only a few, select individuals will ever cast a direct vote for president in the United States. Others complain that the system rewards smaller states with more proportional power than the large ones.

Every four years, around election time, there are murmurs about revamping the system and moving toward a direct, national popular vote.

The Founders’ College:

As one of The Heritage Foundations legal experts, Hans von Spakovsky, noted in a paper on the Electoral College: “In creating the basic architecture of the American government, the Founders struggled to satisfy each state’s demand for greater representation while attempting to balance popular sovereignty against the risk posed to the minority from majoritarian rule.”

Some elements of the Electoral College, such as the indirect vote through intermediaries, were hotly debated at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. It was eventually justified in part as a stopgap to potentially reverse the vote if the people elected a criminal, traitor, or similar kind of heinous person. The Founders wanted to empower democratic elements in the American system, but they feared a kind of pure, unrestrained democracy that had brought down great republics of the past.

The product of the Founders’ compromise has been well balanced and enduring, and we would be wise to leave it intact.

Alexander Hamilton defended the Electoral College in Federalist 68. He argued that it was important for the people as a whole to have a great deal of power in choosing their president, but it was also “desirable” that “the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.”

Hamilton also wrote that this system of intermediaries would produce a greater amount of stability, and that an “ … intermediate body of electors will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of one who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.”

As students of ancient history, the Founders feared the destructive passions of direct democracy, and as recent subjects of an overreaching monarch, they equally feared the rule of an elite unresponsive to the will of the people. The Electoral College was a compromise, neither fully democratic nor aristocratic.

The Constitution states:

Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the state may be entitled in the Congress.

In addition to balancing the protection of individual rights and majority rule, the Founding Fathers attempted to create a “federalist” system that would keep most of  policymaking power reserved to states and localities. America’s presidential election system also was designed to empower the states, not just the American people as an undifferentiated mass.

The total number of electors and thus electoral votes across all states and the District of Columbia—included after the passage of the 23rd Amendment—adds up to 538. The winner must receive a majority, or 270, of these votes to become president.

The system empowers states, especially smaller ones, because it incentivizes presidential candidates to appeal to places that may be far away from population centers. Farmers in Iowa may have very different concerns than bankers in New York. A more federalist system of electing presidents takes that into account.

The states are free to select the method in which they choose their electors. In the early days of the republic, most states chose to have their legislatures pick electors, rather than the people. But, over time, the states shifted to choosing electors via the state’s popular vote instead. Every state has opted for popular election at least since the Civil War.

Calls to Abolish:

Modern opponents of the Electoral College argue against what they call antidemocratic aspects of the institution, criticizing both the intermediary electors and the state-by-state system of voting.

Calls to fundamentally change the Electoral College reached a peak after Republican George W. Bush defeated Democrat Al Gore in the tightly contested 2000 election. Gore narrowly won the national popular vote, and many of  his supporters howled that the system—even without the Supreme Court stepping in—was unfair.

One organization, National Popular Vote, has worked toward eliminating the Electoral College through an amendment to the Constitution or a state compact . National Popular Vote argues that the current system encourages presidential candidates to spend most of their time in “swing states” rather than campaigning for votes across the entire country.

This plan for a national popular vote has received a moderate level of support, but Heritage’s von Spakovsky has called it bad policy, based on mistaken assumptions. Swing states, he wrote, “can change from election to election, and many states that are today considered to be reliably ‘blue’ or ‘red’ in the presidential race were recently unpredictable.”

Many states have signed on to a bill that essentially would tie a state’s electoral votes to the national popular vote. Those states will pledge to swing all of their electoral votes to the winner of the national vote.

But this is because the incentives would be to appeal only to the biggest population centers. Swing states change over time, and the 2016 election could be a prime example of swing-state unpredictability and erosion of the traditional partisan political map.

Additionally, if the president were elected by unfiltered national vote, small and rural states would become irrelevant, and campaigns would spend their time in large, populous districts.

Over 200 Years of Success

Unneeded tinkering with a process that is over two centuries old could destabilize one on the steadiest political systems in the world.

As author and Texas lawyer Tara Ross wrote in a Heritage Foundation memorandum:

America’s election systems have operated smoothly for more than 200 years because the Electoral College accomplishes its intended purposes. America’s presidential election process preserves federalism, prevents chaos, grants definitive electoral outcomes, and prevents tyrannical or unreasonable rule. The Founding Fathers created a stable, well-planned, and carefully designed system—and it works.

November 8, 2022

Three Reasons Why We Should Keep the Electoral College

By: Lydia Switzer

Recently, I wrote about three of the most common objections to the electoral college – the system that has elected presidents in the United States nearly since the country was founded. Those objections primarily stem from misunderstandings regarding the intent and purpose behind the electoral college—and outright ignore the ways that it protects democracy and the voice of every American. With that said, here are three of the many reasons why the electoral college is worth keeping around.

States’ Rights

Too often, critics of the electoral college point to the disproportionate influence that less populated states have in determining the winner of a presidential election. Opponents would prefer a popular vote, where the winner of most votes nationwide is elected president. The 9 most populated states in the U.S. have a higher population than the other 41 states combined – urban areas completely dominate rural areas in population. In a popular vote system, population equals voting power. This is problematic for a number of reasons; for one, the United States is built on a federalist system, where government is layered and states operate as smaller entities within the larger federal structure. For this reason, states tend to take on personalities of their own; they have their own policy priorities and culture. The electoral college, along with the U.S. Senate, protects the interests of rural communities, along with the states which harbor them. In fact, because every state contributes meaningfully to a total elector count in a presidential election, candidates are incentivized to campaign across the country – not just in large cities like New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago. As Allen Guelzo points out in National Affairs , “Clinton’s popular-vote edge in 2016 arose from Democratic voting in just two places — Los Angeles and Chicago. Without the need to win the electoral votes of Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, few candidates would bother to campaign there.”

National Unity

It might sound counterintuitive that a system which breaks up one presidential election into fifty smaller popular elections promotes national unity, but it’s true. As previously mentioned, a presidential candidate must spread their campaigns across the nation, rather than just focusing one a few highly populated areas. Candidates are forced to cater to a broad swath of the country, and when in office, must continue to take into consideration the wide variety of perspectives among various communities in the U.S. Additionally, the electoral college encourages a two-party system; while there are valid criticisms of the two-party system, it ensures that the candidate elected president has received at least close to a majority of the votes in the country. In a national popular vote system, ten candidates could run at once and each receive a significant portion of the vote—if the vote was split relatively evenly, a president could be elected with the support of only 10% of the population. This certainly does not promote democracy, or give more Americans a voice.

Election Security

Following some of the disastrous consequences of a contentious 2020 presidential election, voters are all too aware of the potential for catastrophe when election results are uncertain. While there is always the possibility of voter fraud, miscounts, and other mischief, the electoral college localizes elections and generally protects against national chaos. Concerted efforts to meddle or cheat in an election might easily sway a national popular vote; alternatively, it is far more difficult to influence election outcomes in fifty separate elections across the United States. Each state may take their own desired measures to protect against dishonesty, further complicating a widespread fraud movement. The end result is a system that lends legitimacy to the victorious candidate; the president often wins by a large margin of electoral votes.

The electoral college is a system that protects states’ rights (and, consequently, individual rights), keeps the United States unified, and promotes free and fair elections. Not only are its criticisms misguided, the proposed alternative of a popular vote would do extensive damage to the American election system. It is plain that the electoral college is a system worth praising and protecting.

Lydia Switzer

Lydia is a senior at Cedarville University, where she is studying Political Science. She currently is an intern in the Media Research Center's NewsBusters division, and contributes as a reporter for Cedarville's student paper and magazine. She also is a captain of the school's debate team. In addition to politics, Lydia's interests include playing music on her guitar or euphonium and reading books.

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Does the electoral college need to be reformed, uchicago scholar discusses ways to make voting process more democratic.

The outcome of every U.S. presidential election hinges on a few key swing states, whose electoral votes are awarded in a winner-take-all system. Often, that tips the balance toward one candidate—regardless of how that person performed in the popular vote.

But does choosing a head of state in this manner actually reflect the will of the people? Ensuring that every vote receives an appropriate amount of weight is complicated, according to University of Chicago political scientist James Lindley Wilson, an expert on representation and democratic theory in the United States.

In the following Q&A, Lindley Wilson—an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science—discusses some of the reforms that could make America more democratic.

In both 2016 and 2000, the winner of the Electoral College failed to win the popular vote. If that happens again, will voters be motivated to change the way we elect the president?

If three of the six most recent presidential elections were won by the loser of the popular vote, I do think that would create a lot of momentum and opposition to the Electoral College over the long term—especially if Democratic voters start to think about Electoral College reform as a higher priority issue. Change in the short term is harder to predict, because it would require action by state legislatures at a minimum. If Democrats again win the popular vote but lose the election this year, they probably will not have swept governorships and state legislatures, so the status quo could persist.

Some states have signed onto a pact agreeing to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Could that strategy work if enough states join?

Yes. It’s called the national popular vote movement , and it’s already been passed into law in many states, totaling 196 electoral votes—the states include big ones like California and New York and small ones like Vermont and Hawaii. Typically, the laws are structured such that each state agrees to assign its presidential electors to the winner of the national popular vote—but only if enough other states also agree to do so that it creates an Electoral College majority. This ensures that states don’t water down their own votes unless they will actually achieve a broader shift to a new system.

There’s been quite a lot of success so far. The states that have signed on add up to almost 200 electoral votes, so only a few more big states would need to join to make this effective. Swing states don’t necessarily need to join—all that needs to happen is that enough states join to control 270 electoral votes. If that happens and the coalition survives litigation, it would clear the path for a Constitutional amendment to move to a popular vote.

Originally, the Electoral College was designed to protect small states. How do you think that fits within our ideas about fair representation in a democracy? Does it always mean ‘one person, one vote’?

In principle in an ideal democracy, sometimes it might be okay to have slightly unequally weighted votes, if that’s a way of increasing the representation and authority of minorities that otherwise would be neglected by the political process. The Senate (and the Electoral College) deviate from ‘one person, one vote’ in order to protect small states who would otherwise be neglected.

The problem is, there’s no real evidence that citizens in small states are being neglected in the first place from a political representation standpoint: Those voters tend to be from groups that already have lots of power. So reforms in the spirit of true democracy would try to remedy that by identifying populations that were actually underrepresented and implementing mechanisms to amplify their voices and votes in a responsible way, so that their representation in Congress was equal to that of other voters.

Could the Senate be reformed to be more representative?

The Senate is extremely difficult to change, and not just because of partisanship. The Constitution is written so that a state’s equal representation in the Senate cannot be changed without that state’s consent. That’s very unlikely, of course, because not only would there have to be bipartisan agreement, but states like Alaska or Wyoming would have to say, ‘Yes, we’re willing to have less representation than we currently have.’

There are also current proposals to reform the Senate by adding more states. That’s an imperfect solution, because it means there are still radical inequalities in voting power. The argument is that if those aggregate inequalities better match the partisan balance of the population, that at least creates a closer approximation of the ‘one person, one vote’ ideal within the Senate.

State legislatures are often responsible for drawing districts, which usually end up gerrymandered in favor of whichever party is in power at the time of the census. What might a fairer map-drawing process look like?

Several states, including many western states like Arizona and Colorado, have independent redistricting commissions that work well. Instead of the legislature itself directly drawing the districts, it appoints people to a relatively nonpartisan commission. That commission might have three Republicans and three Democrats, or unaffiliated members. That independent commission is empowered by the legislature and given some principles for what counts as a good district, and usually it avoids the worst abuses of gerrymandering.

Often though, legislatures are reluctant to create these commissions. That’s either because one party fears ceding power, or because incumbents in the majority party benefit from the status quo. If the boundaries of their own districts change, that could put their seats in jeopardy. It’s also worth noting that, until recently, this wasn’t an issue that voters found very important, so it hasn’t necessarily been a top priority for legislatures. I think that’s starting to change.

How healthy is American democracy right now?

I think the United States is probably closer to a breakdown and failure of democracy than it has been for a long time, perhaps since the Civil War. That said, the United States has been authoritarian with respect to significant portions of its population throughout its history—most notably African Americans.

But for the first time this year, we could see democratic backsliding on a large scale. I say that because we see it in all kinds of institutional domains—the rule of law, voter suppression, the Supreme Court and the Senate. One hopes that this election can remedy that somewhat and pull us back from the brink, but democracy is definitely at stake this year.

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Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — Electoral College — Why We Should Keep the Electoral College

Why We Should Keep The Electoral College

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Published: Sep 5, 2023

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Table of contents

Protection of small states, prevention of regional dominance, stability and consensus-building, preserving federalism, encouragement of national unity, conclusion: a balanced democracy.

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Majority of Americans continue to favor moving away from Electoral College

In 2000 and 2016, the winners of the popular vote lost their bids for U.S. president after receiving fewer Electoral College votes than their opponents. To continue tracking how the public views the U.S. system for presidential elections, we surveyed 8,480 U.S. adults from July 10 to 16, 2023.

Everyone who took part in the current survey is a member of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and its methodology .

The Electoral College has played an outsize role in some recent U.S. elections. And a majority of Americans would welcome a change to the way presidents are elected, according to a new Pew Research Center survey .

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults (65%) say the way the president is elected should be changed so that the winner of the popular vote nationwide wins the presidency. A third favor keeping the current Electoral College system.

Public opinion on this question is essentially unchanged from last year, though Americans’ support for using the popular vote to decide the presidency remains higher than it was a few years ago.

Explore Americans’ views of the political system

This article draws from our major report on Americans’ attitudes about the political system and political representation, conducted July 10-16, 2023. For more, explore:

• The report chapter on Americans’ views of proposed changes to the political system
• The full report

The current electoral system in the United States allows for the possibility that the winner of the popular vote may not secure enough Electoral College votes to win the presidency. This occurred in both the 2000 and 2016 elections, which were won by George W. Bush and Donald Trump, respectively.

Partisan views over time

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are far more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to support moving to a popular vote system for presidential elections (82% vs. 47%).

The share of Democrats saying this is nearly identical to last year but higher than in January 2021, a few weeks before President Joe Biden was sworn into office after winning both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

Republicans are fairly divided on this question: 52% support keeping the current Electoral College system, and 47% support moving to a popular vote system. GOP support for moving to a popular vote is the highest it’s been in recent years – up from 37% in 2021 and just 27% in the days following the 2016 election.

Party and ideology

Nearly nine-in-ten liberal Democrats (88%) and about three-quarters of conservative and moderate Democrats (77%) say they would prefer presidents to be elected based on the popular vote.

Ideological differences are wider among Republicans. A clear majority – 63% – of conservative Republicans prefer keeping the current system, while 36% would change it.

The balance of opinion reverses among moderate and liberal Republicans (who make up a much smaller share of the Republican coalition). A majority of moderate and liberal Republicans (63%) say they would back the country moving to a popular vote for president.

Younger adults are somewhat more supportive of changing the system than older adults. About seven-in-ten Americans under 50 (69%) support this. That share drops to about six-in-ten (58%) among those 65 and older.

Political engagement

Political engagement – being interested in and paying attention to politics – is associated with views about the Electoral College, particularly among Republicans.

Highly politically engaged Republicans overwhelmingly favor keeping the Electoral College: 72% say this, while 27% support moving to a popular vote system.

Republicans with a moderate level of engagement are more divided, with 51% wanting to keep the system as is and 48% wanting to change it. And a clear majority of Republicans with lower levels of political engagement (70%) back moving to a popular vote.

Differences by engagement are much less pronounced among Democrats. About eight-in-ten Democrats with low (78%) and medium (82%) levels of engagement favor changing the system, as do 86% of highly engaged Democrats.

Note: This is an update of posts previously published on Jan. 27, 2021 (written by Bradley Jones, a former senior researcher), and Aug. 5, 2022 (written by Jocelyn Kiley and Rebecca Salzer, a former intern). Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and its methodology .

In January 2020, Pew Research Center ran a survey experiment that asked this question in two slightly different ways. One used the language that we and other organizations had used in prior years, with the reform option asking about “amending the Constitution so the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide wins the election.” The other version asked about “changing the system so the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide wins the election.” The January 2020 survey revealed no substantive differences between asking about “amending the Constitution” and “changing the system.”

We conducted this experiment in large part because reforming the way presidents are selected does not technically require amending the Constitution. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact , for example, could theoretically accomplish it without a constitutional amendment. Since there was no substantive difference in the survey results between the two question wordings, we have adopted the revised wording.

• Election System & Voting Process
• Politics & Policy
• U.S. Elections & Voters

Jocelyn Kiley is an associate director of research at Pew Research Center .

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Electoral College

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Electoral College , the system by which the president and vice president of the United States are chosen. It was devised by the framers of the United States Constitution to provide a method of election that was feasible , desirable, and consistent with a republican form of government. For the results of U.S. presidential elections, see the table .

During most of the Constitutional Convention , presidential selection was vested in the legislature. The Electoral College was proposed near the end of the convention by the Committee on Unfinished Parts, chaired by David Brearley of New Jersey , to provide a system that would select the most qualified president and vice president. Historians have suggested a variety of reasons for the adoption of the Electoral College, including concerns about the separation of powers and the relationship between the executive and legislative branches, the balance between small and large states, slavery , and the perceived dangers of direct democracy . One supporter of the Electoral College, Alexander Hamilton , argued that while it might not be perfect, it was “at least excellent.”

Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution stipulated that states could select electors in any manner they desired and in a number equal to their congressional representation (senators plus representatives). (The Twenty-Third Amendment , adopted in 1961, provided Electoral College representation for Washington, D.C. ) The electors would then meet and vote for two people, at least one of whom could not be an inhabitant of their state. Under the original plan, the person receiving the largest number of votes, provided it was a majority of the number of electors, would be elected president, and the person with the second largest number of votes would become vice president. If no one received a majority, the presidency of the United States would be decided by the House of Representatives , voting by states and choosing from among the top five candidates in the electoral vote. A tie for vice president would be broken by the Senate . Despite the Convention’s rejection of a direct popular vote as unwise and unworkable, the initial public reaction to the Electoral College system was favorable. The major issue of concern regarding the presidency during the debate over ratification of the Constitution was not the method of selection but the president’s unlimited eligibility for reelection.

The development of national political parties toward the end of the 18th century provided the new system with its first major challenge. Informal congressional caucuses , organized along party lines, selected presidential nominees. Electors, chosen by state legislatures mostly on the basis of partisan inclination, were not expected to exercise independent judgment when voting. So strong were partisan loyalties in 1800 that all the Democratic-Republican electors voted for their party’s candidates, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr . Since the framers had not anticipated party-line voting and there was no mechanism for indicating a separate choice for president and vice president, the tie had to be broken by the Federalist -controlled House of Representatives. The election of Jefferson after 36 ballots led to the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, which specified separate ballots for president and vice president and reduced the number of candidates from which the House could choose from five to three.

The development of political parties coincided with the expansion of popular choice. By 1836 all states selected their electors by direct popular vote except South Carolina , which did so only after the American Civil War . In choosing electors, most states adopted a general-ticket system in which slates of partisan electors were selected on the basis of a statewide vote. Thus, the winner of a state’s popular vote would win its entire electoral vote. Only Maine and Nebraska have chosen to deviate from this method, instead allocating electoral votes to the victor in each House district and a two-electoral-vote bonus to the statewide winner. The winner-take-all system generally favored major parties over minor parties, large states over small states, and cohesive voting groups concentrated in large states over those that were more diffusely dispersed across the country.

One of the most troubling aspects of the Electoral College system is the possibility that the winner might not be the candidate with the most popular votes. Four presidents— Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000, and Donald Trump in 2016—were elected with fewer popular votes than their opponents, and Andrew Jackson lost to John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives after winning a plurality of the popular and electoral vote in 1824. In 18 elections between 1824 and 2000, presidents were elected without popular majorities—including Abraham Lincoln , who won election in 1860 with under 40 percent of the national vote. During much of the 20th century, however, the effect of the general ticket system was to exaggerate the popular vote, not reverse it. For example, in 1980 Ronald Reagan won just over 50 percent of the popular vote and 91 percent of the electoral vote; in 1988 George Bush received 53 percent of the popular vote and 79 percent of the electoral vote; and in 1992 and 1996 William J. Clinton won 43 and 49 percent of the popular vote, respectively, and 69 and 70 percent of the electoral vote. Third-party candidates with broad national support are generally penalized in the Electoral College—as was Ross Perot , who won 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992 and no electoral votes—though candidates with geographically concentrated support—such as Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond , who won 39 electoral votes in 1948 with just over 2 percent of the national vote—are occasionally able to win electoral votes.

The divergence between popular and electoral votes indicates some of the principal advantages and disadvantages of the Electoral College system. Many who favor the system maintain that it provides presidents with a special federative majority and a broad national mandate for governing, unifying the two major parties across the country and requiring broad geographic support to win the presidency. In addition, they argue that the Electoral College protects the interests of small states and sparsely populated areas, which they claim would be ignored if the president was directly elected. Opponents, however, argue that the potential for an undemocratic outcome—in which the winner of the popular vote loses the electoral vote—the bias against third parties and independent candidates, the disincentive for voter turnout in states where one of the parties is clearly dominant, and the possibility of a “faithless” elector who votes for a candidate other than the one to whom he is pledged make the Electoral College outmoded and undesirable. Many opponents advocate eliminating the Electoral College altogether and replacing it with a direct popular vote. Their position has been buttressed by public opinion polls, which regularly show that Americans prefer a popular vote to the Electoral College system. Other possible reforms include a district plan, similar to those used in Maine and Nebraska, which would allocate electoral votes by legislative district rather than at the statewide level; and a proportional plan, which would assign electoral votes on the basis of the percentage of popular votes a candidate received. Supporters of the Electoral College contend that its longevity has proven its merit and that previous attempts to reform the system have been unsuccessful.

In 2000 George W. Bush ’s narrow 271–266 Electoral College victory over Al Gore , who won the nationwide popular vote by more than 500,000 votes, prompted renewed calls for the abolition of the Electoral College, as did Donald Trump ’s 304–227 Electoral College victory in 2016 over Hillary Clinton , who won the nationwide popular vote by nearly three million votes. Doing so, however, would require adopting a constitutional amendment by a two-thirds vote of both chambers of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states. Because many smaller states fear that eliminating the Electoral College would reduce their electoral influence, adoption of such an amendment is considered difficult and unlikely.

Some advocates of reform, recognizing the enormous constitutional hurdle, instead focused their efforts on passing a so-called National Popular Vote (NPV) bill through state legislatures. State legislatures that enacted the NPV would agree that their state’s electoral votes would be cast for the winner of the national popular vote—even if that person was not the winner of the state’s popular vote; language in the bill stipulated that it would not take effect until the NPV was passed by states possessing enough electoral votes to determine the winner of the presidential election. By 2010 several states—including Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey—had adopted the NPV, and it had been passed in at least one legislative house in more than a dozen other states.

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The Electoral College, Explained

By The New York Times

It remains one of the most surprising facts about voting in the United States: While the popular vote elects members of Congress, mayors, governors, state legislators and even more obscure local officials, it does not determine the winner of the presidency.

That important decision ultimately falls to the Electoral College , which is back in the news following revelations about former President Donald J. Trump’s scheme to manipulate the system by creating false slates of electors in an effort to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.

This is how the Electoral College works:

What is the Electoral College?

The Electoral College is a group of people that elects the president and the vice president of the United States. The word “college” in this case simply refers to an organized body of people engaged in a common task.

Instead of voting for presidential candidates directly, when Americans cast their vote for president, they are voting to elect specific people, known as electors, to the college. Each state gets a certain number of electoral votes based on its population.

The electors are appointed by the political parties in each state. So if a Republican presidential candidate wins the popular vote in your state, then electors that the Republican Party has chosen will cast votes for that candidate, and vice versa for Democrats.

— Jonah E. Bromwich

How does the Electoral College work?

The Electoral College was born at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

The system led to some unusual results from the start, as evident in the election of 1800, in which there was a tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr because they had received an equal number of electoral votes. Congress broke the tie, and Jefferson became president and Burr became vice president. (Until the ratification of the 12th Amendment in 1804, the candidate with the second-highest number of electoral votes became vice president.)

Despite its name, the Electoral College is not a college in the modern educational sense, but refers to a collegium or group of colleagues.

Today, electors are chosen every four years in the months leading up to Election Day, by their respective state’s political parties. Processes vary from state to state, with some choosing electors during state Republican and Democratic conventions, and some states listing electors’ names on the general election ballot.

The process of choosing electors can be an insider’s game, said Kimberly Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and the author of “What You Need to Know About Voting and Why.” They are often state legislators, party leaders or donors, she said.

Electors meet in their respective states each year on the first Monday after the second Wednesday of December to cast separate ballots for president and vice president, with the candidates who receive a majority of votes being elected.

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What are fake electors?

The brazen plan to create false slates of electors was arguably the longest-running and most expansive of the multiple efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The Trump plan began with an effort to persuade Republican officials in the targeted states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — to help draft, or to at least put their names on, documents that declared Mr. Trump to be the victor.

The stated rationale for the plan was that Mr. Biden’s victories in those states would be overturned once Mr. Trump’s allies could establish their claims of widespread voting fraud and other irregularities, and that it was only prudent to have the “alternate” slates of electors in place for that eventuality.

But, as Mr. Trump had been told by his campaign aides and, eventually, even his attorney general, there were no legitimate claims of fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the race, and the seven states all certified Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory on Dec. 14, 2020. Mr. Trump and his allies barreled ahead with the fake electors plan nonetheless, with an increasing focus on using the ceremonial congressional certification process on Jan. 6 to derail the transfer of power.

Once the false pro-Trump slates of electors had been created, Mr. Trump and his allies turned to the second part of the plan: strong-arming Vice President Mike Pence into considering them during the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6. The point was to persuade Mr. Pence to say that the election was somehow flawed or in doubt, or to delay the certification of the electors count. The plan culminated in the violent Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that unfolded as Mr. Pence refused to do so.

— Alan Feuer and Katie Benner

What is the Electoral Count Act?

A bipartisan group of senators has proposed new legislation to modernize the Electoral Count Act , a law passed in 1887 that was intended to settle disputes about how America chooses its presidents, which the senators have called “archaic and ambiguous.” President Donald J. Trump attempted to abuse the law on Jan. 6, 2021, to interfere with Congress’s certification of his election defeat.

The legislation aims to guarantee a peaceful transition from one president to the next, after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol exposed how the current law could be manipulated to disrupt the process. The measure would make it more difficult for lawmakers to challenge a state’s electoral votes when Congress meets to count them. It would also clarify that the vice president has no discretion over the results of that count, and it would set out the steps to begin a presidential transition.

While passage of the new legislation cannot guarantee that a repeat of Jan. 6 will not occur in the future, its authors believe that a rewrite of the antiquated law, particularly the provisions related to the vice president’s role, could discourage such efforts and make it more difficult to disrupt the vote count.

— Carl Hulse

How many electoral votes does it take to win? Can there be a tie?

It takes at least 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. There are 538 electoral votes in all.

Because there is an even number of electoral votes, a tie is feasible. If that happens in the Electoral College, then the election decision goes to the newly seated House of Representatives, with each state’s representatives voting as a unit.

Each state delegation votes on which candidate to support as a group, with the plurality carrying the day. If there is a tie vote within a state’s delegation, the state’s vote does not count. A presidential candidate needs at least 26 votes to win.

The decision on the vice president goes to the newly elected Senate, with each senator casting a vote. Ultimately, any disputes about the procedure could land everything in the Supreme Court.

— Allyson Waller

How many electoral votes does each state have?

A state’s number of electors is identical to the total number of its senators and representatives in Congress. Seven states have the minimum of three electors.

Washington, D.C., also has three electoral votes, thanks to the 23rd Amendment, which gave the nation’s capital as many electors as the state with the fewest electoral votes.

California has the most electoral votes, with 54. Texas is next, with 40, followed by Florida, with 30, and New York, with 28.

Here’s a map with the rest of the numbers.

There are arguments that the states with smaller populations are overrepresented in the Electoral College, because every state gets at least 3 electors regardless of population. In a stark example, sparsely populated Wyoming has three votes and a population of about 580,000, giving its individual voters far more clout in the election than their millions of counterparts in densely populated states like Florida, California and New York. And American citizens who live in territories like Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands are not represented by any electors.

“When you talk about the Electoral College shaping the election, it shapes the election all the time, because it puts the focus on certain states and not others,” said Alexander Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at Harvard University.

— Jonah E. Bromwich and Allyson Waller

Are all states winner-take-all?

Most are, and it helps to think of voting on a state-by-state basis, said Akhil Reed Amar, a professor of law and political science at Yale University.

“It’s just like in tennis,” he said. “It’s how many sets you win and not how many games or points you win. You have to win the set, and in our system, you have to win the state.”

Two exceptions to this rule are Maine and Nebraska, which rely on congressional districts to divvy up electoral votes. The winner of the state’s popular vote gets two electoral votes, and one vote is awarded to the winner of the popular vote in each congressional district.

Can a president lose the popular vote but still win the election?

Yes, and that is what happened in 2016: Although Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by almost three million votes, Donald J. Trump garnered almost 57 percent of the electoral votes , enough to win the presidency.

The same had thing happened in 2000. Although Al Gore won the popular vote, George W. Bush earned more electoral votes after a contested Florida recount and a Supreme Court decision .

And in 1888, Benjamin Harrison defeated the incumbent president, Grover Cleveland, in the Electoral College, despite losing the popular vote. Cleveland ran again four years later and won back the White House.

Other presidents who lost the popular vote but won the presidency include John Quincy Adams and Rutherford B. Hayes, in the elections of 1824 and 1876.

The House of Representatives picked Adams over Andrew Jackson, who had won the popular vote but only a plurality of the Electoral College. A special commission named by the House chose Hayes over Samuel J. Tilden, after 20 electoral votes in Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina were disputed.

The Electoral College has also awarded the presidency to candidates with the most popular votes but not a majority (more than half) in a number of cases, notably Abraham Lincoln in 1860, John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996.

What if electors break their pledge?

People call them “faithless electors.” In 2016, seven electors — 5 Democrats and 2 Republicans — broke their promise to vote for their party’s nominee, the most ever in history. They voted for a variety of candidates not on the ballot, but it did not change the outcome.

Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia have laws that require electors to vote for their pledged candidate. Some states replace electors and cancel their votes if they break that pledge.

Penalties exist in other states. In New Mexico, electors can be charged with a felony if they abandon their pledge, and in Oklahoma a faithless elector could face a misdemeanor charge.

Whether electors should be able to change their positions has been heavily debated, so much so that the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in July 2020 that states may require electors to abide by their promise to support a specific candidate.

Some scholars have said they do not wholeheartedly agree with that decision, arguing that it endangers an elector’s freedom to make the decisions they want, and that electors are usually picked for their loyalty to a candidate or party.

“They will do as promised if the candidates do a very good job vetting them and picking people who are rock solid,” said Akhil Reed Amar, a professor of law and political science at Yale University.

Will the electoral system ever change?

For years there have been debates about abolishing the Electoral College entirely, with the 2016 election bringing the debate back to the surface. It was even a talking point among 2020 Democratic presidential candidates .

The idea has public support, but faces a partisan divide, since Republicans currently benefit from the electoral clout of less populous, rural states.

In 2020, Gallup reported that 61 percent of Americans supported abolishing the Electoral College in favor of the popular vote. However, that support diverges widely based on political parties, with support from 89 percent of Democrats and only 23 percent of Republicans.

One route to changing the system would be a constitutional amendment, which would require two-thirds approval from both the House and Senate and ratification by the states, or a constitutional convention called by two-thirds of the state legislatures.

Some hope to reduce the Electoral College’s importance without an amendment. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia, which together control 195 electoral votes, have signed on to an interstate compact in which they pledge to grant their votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The local laws would take effect only once the compact has enough states to total 270 electoral votes.

An election-related case could find its way to the Supreme Court, which would lend greater importance to the judicial makeup of the court , said Kimberly Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore

“It only takes five people with life tenure to actually amend this Constitution through a judicial opinion,” she said.